SAP's India arm fastest growing within APAC

For Peter Gartenberg, the Managing Director of SAP India, managing growth in this market is a bigger concern than competition with peers like Microsoft, IBM and others.

According to the Germany-based firm’s annual report 2010, its India subsidiary reported revenue of euro 395 million (Rs 2,539.8 crore) reporting a growth of 35 per cent from euro 291.6 million (Rs 1,874.9 crore) in 2009, representing about three per cent of SAP’s global revenue of euro 12.46 billion. The revenue includes SAP Labs India and SAP India Ltd.

India will be the fastest growing region for the company with a 35 per cent growth year-on-year. Whereas the other two regions within APAC (excluding Japan), Australia and China, grew by 23 and 22.5 per cent respectively. In terms of revenue India would be the second largest region for SAP within APAC, with Australia leading the revenue of euro 427.7 million.

Gartenberg, though did not share any specific numbers, does agree that India has been one of the fastest growing regions for the company with a customer base of over 4,700. “I think, India is still a growth market for us. There is still room for implementation of core ERP systems in the enterprise segment and the fast growing small and medium enterprises. A lot of this growth comes from replacement demand, as many firms still have legacy systems or want to move vendors,” he said.

While SAP has been one of the leading players in the enterprise resource planning segment, Gartenberg said with the acquisition of Sybase last year, they are also a leading player in the enterprise mobility space.

“I think mobility is something that every customer relates to and already has some application for mobile users. The growth has been phenomenal in this segment. Mobility will continue to grow as we think desktops are declining in terms of usage in the enterprise segment. Even laptops are reducing. Rather, we think, among enterprises many might just jump to mobile environment,” he said.

The other factor that has helped the company manage to grow in India has been the presence of SAP Labs. “India SAP Labs is the second largest in the world,” he said. He believes SAP India has leveraged the presence of the global localisation team sitting out at SAP Lab India to the fullest. “Over the last one year, we have been able to leverage this. The major competitive advantage for India is that we have by far the most localised offering. When a customer implements a solutions from SAP they do not have to spend time on other expenses etc., these are lot of hidden expenditure,” he said.

The other area that SAP has seen good traction has been its cloud offerings. “We have been surprised by the interest taken by the Indian customers. We thought that the cloud adoption will take some time but things are very different here. For instance, our business-by-design, provides ERP on cloud, it has taken off really well in the last six months. Especially among the mid-tier firms,” he said.